Internet advertising has been present for a long time creating a vast market of advertising solutions. The Internet advertising is very mature and with help of search services, search based advertising is introduced. By using keywords and contextual information of the visited websites the ad networks get a hint of the consumers' profile this enables the ad networks to provide more relevant advertisements for a consumer that is surfing a specific website.
Another ordinary, well used, technique is to store information about the consumer in the browser cookie files. The cookie stores browsing data for a web site.
The advertisers and the media agencies that help the brands to reach out with their message has an interest to always reach the most suitable and desirable consumer category. The more information about the consumer the better relevance the brands will get with their advertising activities. To be seen in the right place for the right consumer is the main target for the advertisers.
Today internet traffic in mobile broadband networks is increasing fast. The internet traffic can be analyzed to derive information about subscriber's internet behavior and dynamic subscriber profiles can be created. A challenge for the mobile broadband (MBB) networks operators is to efficiently analyze all this internet traffic information and leverage on the analysis results.
An example of how the analysis results can be used is transmission of advertisements and other customized content exemplified by mobile apps, games, ring tones, movies, music, etc. This is a growing area and has a huge potential to enable advertisers and content providers to provide customized content and advertisements to the consumers. In order to optimize the revenue for the advertisers and content providers, it is important to optimize the distribution of the content by sending each content to the consumers that have consumer profiles that best fit the type of the content. This is referred to as targeted advertising or targeted content.
Today Mobile Broadband (MBB) subscriber identity over internet and especially mobile broadband is not utilized for targeted advertising. However, every MBB subscriber is connected to the MBB and identified by a Mobile Subscriber Integrated Services Digital Network Number (MSISDN) or similar subscriber identity. Further, each MBB subscriber is allocated an IP address. How to bind the IP address of a MBB subscriber to a specific MSISDN is known technology.
Collecting consumer profile data and storing these profiles with the MSISDN as key for a specific consumer is also known technology.
The MBB devices that can be used are normally Netbook, Laptop or Desktop, but it can also be tablets and smartphones etc. that can surf on the web or install an application.
Nevertheless, still today there exists no solution to utilize the consumer profile information such as the consumer demographics as gender and age, behavioral as e.g. high spender and influential for advertising on the Internet.
Consumer information can be detailed and precise or abstracted in consumer segments and it comes from various sources such as analytic/data mining systems, location based systems, and Call Data Records collected from telecom nodes.
The solution on how to recognize the consumer profile on the public Internet and to make it available for purchase and usage towards the advertising industry/market is still an untapped area.